Why & How to Optimize the Use of Interviewer’s Time?

A job interview is primarily considered as an opportunity for an organisation to evaluate a candidate’s suitability for a position. The recruitment process amounts to an opportunity where the positive representation of the company brand can be promoted regardless of a candidate’s success in his/her application. Any growth-oriented organisation needs to chalk out a hiring plan before conducting a campus recruitment drive that involves large-scale hiring. With the increasing demand for the right talent and the increasing number of companies flocking to those colleges, a concrete recruitment plan is the only way by which the HR team of a company can avoid the last-minute chaos and conduct a smooth drive and optimize their time.

WHY?

Interviewers normally are subject experts, they have to specially take out time for the interviews and also ensure that their core work/responsibility doesn’t get hampered. Time spent by them in interviewing is one of the biggest ‘costs’ in the whole exercise. Although recruitment may seem an arduous and challenging task, with proper time management, it helps you hire quality candidates who add value to your company. In the past few years, there has been a considerable shift in the campus recruitment process. Companies are trying to switch to using automation to streamline their hiring process in a cost-effective way, leaving behind the traditional recruiting process which involves a lot of manual work. Automation has not only streamlined and eased the entire recruiting process, but also eliminated biases and prejudice in the hiring process, ensuring that the best-suited candidates join the firm.

How?

• Effective Communication of Requirement: While conducting an interview, one of the steps to take is to get a clear and better idea of the type of qualities and talents that the job profile requires and communicating this requirement effectively to the interviewers. Defining the ideal candidate and the skill sets that the company or the particular role requires is important in saving the interviewers time. It is important to create and share the accurate job description and requirements of the roles with the colleges so that it attracts the right candidates.

A recruiter and the candidates should know what education qualification, experience, knowledge, and the right skill sets in a candidate the organisation are looking for and the role requires.

• Filtered Candidates: Every process requires a plan and preparation and the plan to work without any hassles, it has to be proper and well organised. Before arriving at the campus for the hiring process, recruiting managers must have a solid grasp on what they are hoping to achieve. It is important to filter the resumes and select candidates that need to be interviewed based on the necessary skill sets that match the job requirements. There should be adequately designed filtering criteria. This will save time and effort from interviewing all the candidates who have sent in their resumes.

• Right  Assessment & Selection Criteria: While interviewing candidates an interviewer should try and use different methodologies to assess the analytical skills and learnings of the candidates. Assessment tests are one way to evaluate the skills of the candidates and filter out the average performers to retain the best ones. This is because, assessment tests evaluate the knowledge, problem-solving ability, writing skills and technical skills of the candidate. It is important to ask the right questions to spot the skills that are required for the role and also to have an accurate marking criterion to rightly filter out the candidates. This will not only help you get the right applications but will form the basis to creating interview questions and assessment questions too before shortlisting for interviews.

• Planned & Trained Interviewers: There is nothing better than a well organised and planned interview process. Planning the process of the interview step-by-step is essential as this will save the time of both the interviewers and the candidates and will help in having a fast, efficient and consistent recruiting process for a prosperous hiring program. Untrained interviewers take longer time than trained interviewers. It is important to have trained interviewers who know what they are looking for and to ask the right questions to find the best talent. A trained interviewer will know how to analyse candidates’ attitude toward important issues such as – teamwork, communication capabilities, stressed situations, future plans, learning curve, motivations, dominance and methods of work. Hence, it is essential to train interviewers to ask the right questions and access the answers.
• Automating Interview Process: Following the traditional hiring method is a time-consuming process as it involves a lot of manual work. Automating a few processes in the recruitment drive saves a lot of time and helps the HR to hire the best candidates who can increase the overall productivity of the firm. It enhances the recruitment process and makes it more efficient. Automating your HR recruitment process could save time, avoid missed opportunity to recruit the right candidate and avoid compliance errors and recruitment delays. Additionally to that automating the recruitment process helps you in resume screening, data collection and storage, interview scheduling, feedback communication and easy access to all details of the candidates, assessment and interview feedbacks. It acts as a single point of data entry and aids you to make better decisions.

Conclusion

It is essential to have a  fast, efficient and consistent recruiting process for a prosperous hiring program. Although recruitment may seem an arduous and challenging task, with proper time management, it helps you hire quality candidates who add value to your company. It is key to improve the overall recruitment strategy and optimise the interviewer’s time. Effective communication of the requirements of the role and company with colleges will attract the right candidates. Scanning through applications and picking candidates that match the requirements and skills will result in the filtering of the best candidates. It is also important to plan the interview process and ask the right questions, along with having trained interviewers to do the process. Meticulous planning and preparation removes the last-minute hassles and saves a lot of time for the hiring team. This will allow the company to stay ahead of the curve and competition, getting better and faster at recruiting top talent. For more information please visit https://pod.ai/employers.